A European space telescope has revealed extensive details of stellar diversity within our Milky Way, which will help scientists reconstruct the evolution of the galaxy and predict its development for billions of years in the future.
Astronomers are using new data from the Gaia Observatory to map the movements and chemical signatures of nearly 2 billion stars (giants and dwarfs, large and young), including some that vibrate violently during events known as “earthquakes.” .
The multidimensional cosmic survey was released on Monday by the European Space Agency (ESA). Astronomers compared its impact in its field to genomic analysis in biology.
“Our galaxy is a beautiful crucible of stars,” said Alejandra Recio-Blanco of the Côte d’Azur Observatory and a member of the Gaia collaboration. “This diversity is extremely important because it tells us the history of the formation of our galaxy… It also clearly shows that we all belong to a constantly changing system, formed by the coupling of stars and gases from different sources.”
Gaia is in a special orbit 1.5 million km from Earth, called the Lagrange L2 Point, near the new James Webb Telescope, which was launched into space late last year. Gaia’s 1.8 billion star sample is about one percent of the Milky Way’s total stellar population.
“Gaia is a fact-finding mission,” said Timo Prusti, a project scientist at ESA, in contrast to many other observatories, such as the Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes. He said that this approach means that “Gaia is forced to make discoveries that other more dedicated missions would be lost.”
“We can’t wait for the astronomy community to dive into our new data to find out even more about our galaxy and its environment,” Prusti said.
The publication of data adds new information about the chemical composition, temperature, mass and speed of motion of stars to or from the solar system. Many stars like the sun contain recycled heavy metals from previous generations of stars that were born and died during the Milky Way’s 13.6 billion-year history, although some contain only the essential light elements hydrogen and helium.
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An unexpected discovery that emerges from the new data is Gaia’s ability to detect earthquakes: strong oscillations, such as stellar tsunamis, detected in thousands of stars. Conny Aerts, an asterosismologist at KU Leuven in Belgium, said: “Earthquakes teach us a lot about stars, especially their inner workings. ”.
Although Gaia was launched in 2013 primarily to map stars, it is also cataloging other objects, from millions of galaxies far beyond the Milky Way to asteroids in our solar system.
The telescope begins to detect planets orbiting the stars it studies, known as exoplanets. Anthony Brown, president of the Gaia data analytics consortium, said so far about 200 probable planets had been identified elsewhere in the Milky Way “but should be able to identify tens of thousands of exoplanets as that we receive more data “.
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